During SES San Jose, Nitin Mangtani’s spoke on converting visitors to customers through the use of internal site search. He discussed, how most of the business invests big money into website development, revamps and search marketing initiatives, fail to retain the traffic for conversion.
Getting people to a website can be a huge challenge in itself. But once you get the traffic what’s the next strategy to retain them and convert those buyers into your customers and subscribers?
Google search and various other search engine in the market have done a great job in building high standards of driving search results based on relevance, speed, and ease of use. But once people enter the website, most sites fail to meet customer expectation by not delivering the required information and there by leading to people exiting the site. People turn to search and continue their pursuit of search.
When search engines have set such high standards why should this be any different when a visitor comes to your website? In order to deliver the similar experience, Google recommends making search box on the website as one of the main components on or near the main navigation. This helps in refining search queries and returning quick and relevant results especially when a website has many pages in its navigation structure there by creating a great user experience.
Effective Site-search should be simple and easy to be found. One should not hide the search box.
Here are the benefits of integrating Google site-search:
- Narrows down search queries related to the search
- Top results can be set by marketing team on what page to promote.
- Organic results are run by Google’s algorithm
- Query suggests helps users and allows user to find results with in a product category.
- Can blend search and shopping experience with e-commerce
Lastly irrespective of whether people are searching on not, what really matters is, not to lose focus on the quality of content and product/service which is being sold. Once site-search is integrated with the website, analyze the search as it can provide deep insights to what customers really are looking for and this can help channelizing your products and services to meet their demands.
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Contributed by: Bhuvana Krishnan, Milestone Internet Marketing
References: SES Session San Jose, Search engine guide and Adam Singer, Online marketing blog
